Original sin, nowadays is usually not welcomed by most Christians of Western culture. Religious traditions on original sin are felt to be uncomfortably strange in our society where people, by common consent, see themselves so unconnected to others that the actions of one person are supposed to leave other people untouched. Such cultural agreement is at the roots of a society that believes every person is free and able to achieve whatever he/she wants. Since original sin doctrines clearly deny such “unconnectedness”, no wonder they are often rejected and reduced to a teaching as simplistic as “a spot on a child’s soul!” This articles suggests that original sin traditions can speak to our contemporary culture, challenge some of its deepest presuppositions, and lead to new levels of awareness of what it means to be Christian in today’s world.
To understand the meaning of doctrines which are expressed in what anthropologists call mythical tales or myths, it is relevant to recognize the different representations of the world which flow from different mythical tales, and the effects of those different representations. I submit that a doctrine as “religious” as Original Sin says a lot about how we envision the civil organization of society. Furthermore, the present disregard for this doctrine is related to social and political respresentations. I will thus compare the basic assumptions of the original sin myth with another set of assumptions, those underlying the individualistic world view which is sometimes summarized in-another myth: the civil religion of free enterprise.
Various interpretations of original sin have attempted to articulate individual and collective dimensions of the sinful condition. These interpretations at the same time propose diverse understandings of the relationship between history and our present actions. Classical Catholicism seems to identify original sin with the tendency of each individual toward selfishness and personal aggrandizement.